29 March 2019
A quick English summary of our Arabic news coverage this week.
Damascus
A young Damascus resident questions the value of the cultural initiatives sponsored by international NGOs in the regime-held capital.
Five years on from the kidnapping of the ‘Douma 4’ activists, Joey Ayoub pays homage to another Damascus suburb symbolic of Syria’s peaceful, democratic revolution.
A previously-unknown Syrian businessman has amassed a fortune during the war. With warm ties to the regime, Russia, Turkey, and the Gulf, he may have a prominent political future too.
Al-Jumhuriya gains access to Qudsaya juvenile prison, where food shortages, drugs, and physical and psychological abuse are rampant, leaving many detainees worse off when they come out than when they went in.
Every major party to the Syrian conflict without exception shares in the blame for a needless humanitarian disaster that could be resolved in a day.
The thriving trade in possessions and even infrastructure looted by the Syrian regime isn't just a symptom of economic crisis and a wider moral breakdown following the war; it points to the ever-worsening criminality that awaits the country's future under Assad.
Following the collapse of Jaysh al-Islam’s rule in Douma, Yassin al-Haj Saleh traveled to Turkey to seek answers from the city’s displaced residents about his wife, Samira, and three other activists abducted with her there in 2013.
Despite the enormous professional and personal price she paid for it—including arrest by Assad’s infamous security agencies—the celebrated 49-year-old actress never wavered in her support for Syria’s revolutionaries.
For over 100,000 civilians expelled from Eastern Ghouta, their new homes in official shelters bear striking resemblance to the regime’s fearsome detention centers.
Russia, Iran, and Turkey have now clearly delineated their zones of control in northern Syria, and are looking next to re-open the international highway extending from Turkey to Jordan.
In the second of four articles written during the forced displacement of Eastern Ghouta’s residents, our reporter looks at the local efforts to house almost 50,000 new arrivals in the country’s already-saturated northern provinces, often relying entirely on private funds, donations, and coordination.